'Cloud Atlas' Author Releases New Short Story Entirely On Twitter

In this Oct. 14, 2012 photo, British author David Mitchell, from the upcoming film "Cloud Atlas", poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. The stars of âCloud Atlas," along with Mitchell, who wrote the novel that inspired the genre-bending epic about souls returning and intertwining over the centuries, shared their beliefs and disbeliefs about reincarnation as the film heads to U.S. theaters Oct. 26, 2012. Hanks himself doesn't buy into reincarnation, while Berry, Whishaw, Mitchell, Sarandon and co-stars Hugo Weaving and Jim Sturgess either believe or at least think it's possible that souls come back for an encore. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP)

Mitchell, who rarely uses the Twitter account, started tweeting the story on July 14. Throughout the course of six days and roughly 270 tweets, he released “The Right Sort,” a short story that takes place in the same fictional world as his upcoming novel.

“The story is being narrated in the present tense by a boy tripping on his mother’s Valium pills. He likes Valium because it reduces the bruising hurly-burly of the world into orderly, bite-sized ‘pulses’. So the boy is essentially thinking and experiencing in Tweets,” the author told The Guardian. “My hope is then that the rationale for deploying Twitter comes from inside the story, rather than it being imposed by me, from outside, as a gimmick.”

We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’

“I’ll be doing some events to promote [The Bone Clocks], and my publicist persuaded me of the logic of having a Twitter account so at least we could tell people of these events," he told BBC Radio 4. “But it somehow bothered me, a little bit, that I was using this Arab Spring-size technology just to say, ‘Hi, I’m going off on the road, please come see me and buy my book.’ It seemed a bit cheesy, really. So I thought, how can I sort of find a use for it? And this led me to fiction.”

The Bone Clocks, due out in September, is about a young woman and her adventures involving psychic phenomena and "dangerous mystics," as well as the effects her decisions have on those close to her, according to the book's description on Amazon.